The Stand:BOOK I(25)

"All of them?" he heard himself ask. "Ralph's whole family?"

Deitz turned the paper over. "No, there's a little girl. Eva. Four years old. She's alive."

"Well, how is she?"

"I'm sorry, that's classified."

Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz's lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the corner of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and soundproofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.

"What did you people do?" he shouted. "What did you do? What in Christ's name did you do?"

"Mr. Redman-"

"Huh? What the fuck did you people do?"

The door hissed open. Three large men in olive-drab uniforms stepped in. They were all wearing nose-filters.

Deitz looked over at them and snapped, "Get the hell out of here!"

The three men looked uncertain.

"Our orders-"

"Get out of here and that's an order!"

They retreated. Deitz sat calmly on the bed. His lapels were rumpled and his hair had tumbled over his forehead. That was all. He was looking at Stu calmly, even compassionately. For a wild moment Stu considered ripping his nose-filter out, and then he remembered Geraldo, what a stupid name for a guinea pig. Dull despair struck him like cold water. He sat down.

"Christ in a sidecar," he muttered.

"Listen to me," Deitz said. "I'm not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can't lay it all on him, either. He ran, but under the circumstances, you or I might have run, too. It was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn't make us responsible."

"Then who is?"

"Nobody," Deitz said, and smiled. "On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it's invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways."

"Some accident," Stu said, his voice nearly a whisper. "What about the others? Hap and Hank Carmichael and Lila Bruett? Their boy Luke? Monty Sullivan-"

"Classified," Deitz said. "Going to shake me some more? If it will make you feel better, shake away."

Stu said nothing, but the way he was looking at Deitz made Deitz suddenly look down and begin to fiddle with the creases of his pants.

"They're alive," he said, "and you may see them in time."

"What about Arnette?"

"Quarantined."

"Who's dead there?"

"Nobody."

"You're lying."

"Sorry you think so."

"When do I get out of here?"

"I don't know."

"Classified?" Stu asked bitterly.

"No, just unknown. You don't seem to have this disease. We want to know why you don't have it. Then we're home free."

"Can I get a shave? I itch."

Deitz smiled. "If you'll allow Denninger to start running his tests again, I'll get an orderly in to shave you right now."

"I can handle it. I've been doing it since I was fifteen."

Deitz shook his head firmly. "I think not."

Stu smiled dryly at him. "Afraid I might cut my own throat?"

"Let's just say-"

Stu interrupted him with a series of harsh, dry coughs. He bent over with the force of them.

The effect on Deitz was galvanic. He was up off the bed like a shot and across to the airlock with his feet seeming not to touch the floor at all. Then he was fumbling in his pocket for the square key and ramming it into the slot.

"Don't bother," Stu said mildly. "I was faking."

Deitz turned to him slowly. Now his face had changed. His lips were thinned with anger, his eyes staring. "You were what?"

"Faking," Stu said. His smile broadened.

Deitz took two uncertain steps toward him. His fists closed, opened, then closed again. "But why? Why would you want to do something like that?"

"Sorry," Stu said, smiling. "That's classified."

"You shit sonofabitch," Deitz said with soft wonder.

"Go on. Go on out and tell them they can do their tests."

He slept better that night than he had since they had brought him here. And he had an extremely vivid dream. He had always dreamed a great deal-his wife had complained about him thrashing and muttering in his sleep-but he had never had a dream like this.

He was standing on a country road, at the precise place where the black hottop gave up to bone-white dirt. A blazing summer sun shone down. On both sides of the road there was green corn, and it stretched away endlessly. There was a sign, but it was dusty and he couldn't read it. There was the sound of crows, harsh and far away. Closer by, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, fingerpicking it. Vic Palfrey had been a picker, and it was a fine sound.

This is where I ought to get to, Stu thought dimly. Yeah, this is the place, all right.

What was that tune? "Beautiful Zion"? "The Fields of My Father's Home"? "Sweet Bye and Bye"? Some hymn he remembered from his childhood, something he associated with full immersion and picnic lunches. But he couldn't remember which one.

Then the music stopped. A cloud came over the sun. He began to be afraid. He began to feel that there was something terrible, something worse than plague, fire, or earthquake. Something was in the corn and it was watching him. Something dark was in the corn.

He looked, and saw two burning red eyes far back in the shadows, far back in the corn. Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, he thought. The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no.

Then the dream was fading and he awoke with feelings of disquiet, dislocation, and relief. He went to the bathroom and then to his window. He looked out at the moon. He went back to bed but it was an hour before he got back to sleep. All that corn, he thought sleepily. Must have been Iowa or Nebraska, maybe northern Kansas. But he had never been in any of those places in his life.

                       
       
           



       Chapter 14

It was quarter of twelve. Outside the small pillbox window, dark pressed evenly against the glass. Deitz sat alone in the office cubicle, tie pulled down, collar button undone. His feet were up on the anonymous metal desk, and he was holding a microphone. On top of the desk, the reels of an old-fashioned Wollensak tape recorder turned and turned.

"This is Colonel Deitz," he said. "Located Atlanta facility code PB-2. This is Report 16, subject file Project Blue, subfile Princess/Prince. This report, file, and subfile are Top Secret, classification 2-2-3, eyes only. If you are not classified to receive this material, fuck off, Jack."

He stopped and let his eyes fall closed for a moment. The tape reels ran on smoothly, undergoing all the correct electrical and magnetic changes.

"Prince gave me one helluva scare tonight," he said at last. "I won't go into it; it'll be in Denninger's report. That guy will be more than willing to quote chapter and verse. Plus, of course, a transcription of my conversation with Prince will be on the telecommunications disc which also contains the transcription of this tape, which is being made at 2345 hours. I was almost pissed enough to hit him, because he scared the living Jesus out of me. I am not pissed anymore, however. The man put me into his shoes, and for just a second there I knew exactly how it feels to shake in them. He's a fairly bright man once you get past the Gary Cooper exterior, and one independent sonofabitch. If it suits him, he'll find all sorts of novel monkey-wrenches to throw into the gears. He has no close family in Arnette or anyplace else, so we can't put much of a hammerlock on him. Denninger has volunteers-or says he does-who'll be happy to go in and muscle him into a more cooperative frame of mind, and it may come to that, but if I may be pardoned another personal observation, I believe it would take more muscle than Denninger thinks. Maybe a whole lot more. For the record, I am still against it. My mother used to say you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, and I guess I still believe it.

"Again, for the record, he still tests virus-clean. You figure it out."

He paused again, fighting the urge to doze off. He had managed only four hours of sleep in the last seventy-two.

"Records as of twenty-two-hundred hours," he said formally, and picked a sheaf of reports off the desk. "Henry Carmichael died while I was talking with Prince. The cop, Joseph Robert Brentwood, died half an hour ago. This won't be in Dr. D's report, but he was all but shitting green apples over that one. Brentwood showed a sudden positive response to the vaccine type …  uh … " He shuffled papers. "Here it is. 63-A-3. See subfile, if you like. Brentwood's fever broke, the characteristic swellings in the glands of the neck went down, he reported hunger, and ate a poached egg and a slice of unbuttered toast. Spoke rationally, wanted to know where he was, and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-do. Then, around twenty-hundred hours, the fever came back with a bang. Delirious. He broke the restraints on his bed and went reeling around the room, yelling, coughing, blowing snot, the whole bit. Then he fell over and died. Kaboom. The opinion of the team is that the vaccine killed him. It made him better for a while, but he was getting sick again even before it killed him. So, it's back to the old drawing boards."